All posts for the month June, 2015

We’re delighted – no, scrub that, we’re proud – to be publishing a rather special book by the scholar and writer Charles Moseley. Latitude North is his account of a life-long love affair with the northern lands and seas, from his first voyage as a trainee deckhand on a deep sea trawler to his return to the northlands as the guest lecturer on an Arctic cruise ship. Defying categorisation, it combines history, literature, travel writing, botany and science, ranging from latest discoveries on pre-Christian navigation to the impact of development on some of the most remote settlements in the world. And while it has the erudition and insight you’d expect from a Fellow of a Cambridge college, the author has lived every moment and visited every location, from the ice-bound coast of Spitzbergen to the Viking settlements in Greenland and Newfoundland.

It’s been an odd experience to be finalising ‘Robin Cook: Principles and Power’ against the backdrop of the Labour leadership election. Whether it’s Europe, or multiculturalism, or the situation in Syria, we keep thinking ‘what would Robin have said?’, or found passages in the text that resonated powerfully on these contemporary issues.

But we’ve avoided the temptation to speculate on who Robin, one of the great Labour leaders of the previous generation, would have supported this time round (or, had he lived, whether he might have become leader himself after Blair, or Brown – and whether history might then have been very different…).

Hopefully this hasn’t distracted our designers and proof-readers. We’re really pleased with the cover – when we came across this image we knew it was just right, and only needed a plain title (in Helvetica, with a hint of New Labour) to round it off.